WordPress Announces Free .blog Subdomains

Good news has recently come out for those who struggle to find a good domain name for their wordpress blogs. WordPress has just announced that they can now get subdomains with the extension of .blog for their blog’s domain names.

While not all of them use custom domain, quite a heap of them utilize the free WordPress domain. Such as abc.wordpress.com.

As a matter of fact, since the barriers to entry are next to none (as you can start your own WordPress blog absolutely free of cost, with just a few clicks), the obvious side-effects are that you’d eventually run out of good domain names that reflect what your blog is actually about.

So, as a remedy, WordPress has announced the option of free .blog subdomains for new blogs.

What is a Subdomain?

A subdomain is further division of the primary (or top-level) domain. For e.g. if google.com is the primary top-level domain, mail.google.com is the subdomain. Here, the “mail” is the subdomain.

You can assign multiple subdomains to a single top-level domain and the best example is the WordPress itself. I’m sure you must’ve encountered thousands of websites/blogs with their domains being something like, “some-name.wordpress.com”.

Here, the WordPress is taking advantage of being able to assign multiple subdomains to its single parent domain of WordPress. In the case of WordPress, I’m sure there must be millions of subdomains.

What’s new with the WordPress’s FREE .blog Subdomain Announcement?

Well, before the said announcement, users had to make do with the wordpress.com domain thus limiting their choice of names.

Ever since the WordPress’s announcement, now they will have more option to come up with the names that best describe their blogs. For e.g., if you wish to create a blog in the health and fitness niche, you might be able to grab domain name like healthtips.fitness.blog.

How do you get the FREE .blog Subdomain?

First things first, this option is only available for the new blogs. You cannot change the name of your existing blog to the new one.

In order to claim the .blog subdomain, you need to follow the below steps:

Step #1. Create a new site

In WordPress.com, click the Create Site button. In Let’s Create a Site window, enter the information that best suits your blog, however, make sure that you choose the option of, Share ideas, experiences, updates, reviews, stories, videos, or photos in the What’s the primary goal you have for your site section.

If you choose any other option, you cannot claim the free subdomain. Click the Continue button to move to step number 2.

Step #2. Select the Subdomain for your Blog

Based on the information that you’ve provided in step 1, WordPress, using its algorithm, will come up with the available names. Make sure you choose the one with the Free option. Click the Select button and you’re good to go to step 3 which includes selecting the hosting package for your blog. Since this is currently off-topic, I’d rather not dwell in it.

What’s the catch…?

Though the new announcement will certainly provide those with less means to afford a paid custom domain more options to select names that best suit the nature of their blogs, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, you’ll still end up with a subdomain.

.blog is a top-level domain just like .com, .net or .info. What WordPress did is that it has reserved many of the domains on top of this .blog domain such as art.blog, school.blog or business.blog. Here’s the complete list.

So any person who wants to avail the free subdomain will have to put up with an additional layer of the top-level domain. For e.g. if you want to own a blog with the domain name of health.blog that’s simply not possible. You may have to make do with say, health.fitness.blog.

Secondly, the “fitness” in the fitness.blog also depends on WordPress’s discretion. It decides which keyword would go well with your domain name based on the information that you’d provide in the step 1 above.

So there’s a chance (even though quite slim) that you might not even get the exact domain that best describes your blog.

For e.g., I tested if I could grab health.fitness.blog domain for my supposed blog in the health and fitness niche. In the first step, where it asked what’s my blog is about, I chose the niche of Health and Fitness.

In What would you like to name your site, I chose, Health. However, in the next step, I ended up with heal.photo.blog.

Apparently, this is the closest that WordPress can offer me right now as the other more pertinent domain names have been already taken away.

So despite introducing new domain, the rule of first-come-first-serve still applies (obviously…!)

Final Word

Finally, the WordPress’s new announcement is definitely a piece of good news for those who cannot afford to buy custom domains for their blogs. It may very well serve those who don’t mind having to see subdomains in their blog names. However, this not in any way means that you shouldn’t strive to have your own custom, and paid domain name if you can truly afford owning one. It not only makes the name more memorable but also adds up to the credibility of your blog.

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